* Astronomy

An Iranian research team has found dinosaur fossils thought to be 100 million years old in the heights of Mashhad's Kallat region.
The rib and vertebra fossils were found by the Mashhad Open University research team and have been sent to Germany for detailed examination.
German scientists believe the fossils are the remains of a breed of plesiosaurus, an aquatic reptile that thrived during the early part of the Jurassic Period and which cruised the deep seas.

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One of the oldest and most complete plesiosaur fossils recovered in North America, and the oldest yet discovered from the Cretaceous Period, represents a new genus of the prehistoric aquatic predator according to University of Calgary palaeontologists who have formally described the creature after its remains were uncovered in a Syncrude Canada Ltd. mine near Fort McMurray in 1994.
In a paper published in the current issue of the German research journal Palaeontographica Abteilung A, former University of Calgary graduate student Patrick Druckenmiller and biological sciences professor Anthony Russell have named the 2.6-metre-long plesiosaur Nichollsia borealis in memory of the late Elizabeth (Betsy) Nicholls. Nicholls was a renowned palaeontologist and U of C alumna who is credited with transforming the understanding of prehistoric ocean life by describing the largest-ever marine reptile, a 23-metre-long ichthyosaur, discovered in northern British Columbia in 1999.

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A fossil hunter is claiming to have found the bones of a Loch Ness monster in a quarry on the outskirts of Peterborough.
Eighteen-year-old Jamie Jordan, nicknamed the Fossil Kid, made the exciting discovery in a hunt around the disused quarries in Yaxley.
And Jamie, of Canwell, Werrington, Peterborough, was amazed to also find the bones of a younger creature just 25 feet below the ground.
After months of studying with a palaeontologist, the bigger bones have been confirmed as those of a Plesiosaur one of the first kinds of extinct animal known to science, which resemble Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster.

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Remains of a bus-sized prehistoric "monster" reptile found on a remote Arctic island may be a new species never before recorded by science.
Initial excavation of a site on the Svalbard islands in August yielded the remains, teeth, skull fragments and vertebrae of a reptile estimated to measure nearly 40 feet long.

"It seems the monster is a new species" Joern Harald Hurum of the University of Oslo.

The reptile appears be the same species as another sea predator whose remains were found nearby on Svalbard last year. His team described those 150-million-year-old remains as belonging to a short-necked plesiosaur measuring more than 30 feet - "as long as a bus ... with teeth larger than cucumbers."
The short-necked plesiosaur was a voracious reptile often compared to the Tyrannosaurus rex of the oceans.
Mark Evans, a plesiosaur expert at the Leicester City Museums in Britain, said he not know enough about the Norwegian find to comment on it specifically. But he said new types of the sea reptiles are being found regularly.

"We are regularly seeing new species of plesiosaurs popping up - in a way because, in the past 10 or 15 years, there has been what we call a renaissance in plesiosaur research" - Mark Evans.

Hurum said the team had only managed to excavate a 3-meter area of the find. The Norwegian-led team plans to present more detailed findings early next year, and return to Svalbard, 300 miles north of Norway's mainland, to excavate further next year.

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